ABSTRACT
The notion of thick translation addresses the question of understanding and representing, in one’s own language, texts that derive from a culture and language significantly different from one’s own. Thick translation is concerned less with recontextualizing translations in their new environment than with respecting the integrity of the original utterance and its context. The Ghanaian-American philosopher and cultural theorist Kwame Anthony Appiah proposed the notion of thick translation in an essay with the same title which first appeared in 1993. In Appiah’s words, A thick description of the context of literary production, a translation that draws on and creates that sort of understanding, meets the need to challenge ourselves and our students to go further, to undertake the harder project of a genuinely informed respect for others. Thick translation as a way of representing concepts of translation across cultures is also at work in Martha Cheung’s two-volume Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation.
